| Summary: | The Internet has truly become a worldwide phenomenon in recent years, with
more and more countries coming online every day. The new global economy that the
Internet enables is the main catalyst behind this embrace of the Internet by even the most
closed societies. However, the wide variety of material available on the Internet presents
a problem for legislators all over the world, and as a result a broad range of free speech
policies have been adopted by governments. The focus of this thesis is to find possible
relations between the e-commerce concerns that a particular country has and the free
speech policy that it chooses. Having these relations can help to predict how a free
speech policy will change over time.
The thesis starts with a description of blocking and filtering, as that is central to
the free speech policies in many countries. Next, a survey of the free speech policies and
e-commerce statistics for countries from all major regions of the world is presented. This
data is analyzed to determine how e-commerce concerns can affect the free speech policy
of a country. Finally, trends on how free speech policies can change over time due to
economic factors are outlined. === Science, Faculty of === Computer Science, Department of === Graduate
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